The photo at right may well provide a pivotal moment in a new American revolution. It exposes a crack in the façade of the corporate security state that could grow to the point that rule by and for the 1% may some time soon internally collapse.

The real story lies not in the fact that retired Philadelphia Police Captain Ray Lewis was arrested by the NYPD during an Occupy Wall Street confrontation. (Video of arrest posted below). It's the potential that Lewis' recognition of immense betrayal will spread throughout the rank and file of the security apparatus even as the clueless and increasingly desperate power elites seek to effectuate a coordinated crackdown on Occupy Wall Street encampments...

The futility of encampment assaults

The coordinated hyper-militarized, pre-dawn raids, like the October 25 assault on Occupy Oakland does more than underscore the desperation of what former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges described as our "decaying corporate regime." It exposes the underlying futility of the power elites and their giant internal security and surveillance state.

Occupy Wall Street is not a place. It will not end with the removal of encampments or even under a barrage of CS gas, rubber bullets and pepper spray against peaceful demonstrators exercising their Constitutional First Amendment rights. "By not being somewhere," Ralph Nader observed in a Nov. 16 email, "the Occupy movement will now be everywhere."

Nader's prescient observation was underscored on Nov. 18 when the movement marked its two month anniversary with massive actions across the nation, which included major disruptions for the New York Stock Exchange and a march of some 32,000 demonstrators across the Brooklyn Bridge.

While Occupy Wall Street engages in demonstrations, it is not, like earlier anti-war movements, a form of simple "protest." It does not seek to persuade political elites, who long ago sold their souls to the corporate security state, to vote the right way on this or that issue. It seeks nothing less than the revolutionary elimination of corporate rule and the erection of an egalitarian democracy in its place.

And, as it both disperses and grows stronger, Occupy Wall Street has before it a myriad of peaceful, non-violent tactics at its disposal, such as the relatively simple Move Your Money campaign, which may already be having a devastating financial impact on the giant banking institutions who brought us the 2008 financial meltdown.

There is a basic weakness in governments, however massive their armies, however they control images and information, because their power depends on the obedience of citizens, of soldiers, of civil servants and writers and teachers and artists. When the citizens begin to suspect that they have been deceived and withdraw their support, government loses its legitimacy and its power.

When police change sides

"All the cops are just workers for the one percent," Ray Lewis said, "and they don’t even realize they’re being exploited."

Actually, a good number of police officers not only know they're being exploited but understand that they are being asked to line up on the wrong side of the 1% vs. 99% divide. As we reported last February, "a wide swath of Wisconsin society, entailing not only both public and private union members, but students, doctors, nurses, teachers, police officers...and fire fighters...swarmed the streets and public buildings of Madison as part of a mass movement [against GOP union-busting] rivaling those we've recently seen on the streets of Cairo."

More recently, we covered the comments of Oakland Police Officer Fred Shavies, who observed that video of police officers firing tear gas at peaceful demonstrators on Oct. 25 at 14th & Broadway, "could be...the video of our generation. That could be our Birmingham," referencing the the police brutality that served to accelerate the civil rights movement, leading to the demise of Jim Crow.

Ernest A. Canning has been an active member of the California state bar since 1977. Mr. Canning has received both undergraduate and graduate degrees in political science as well as a juris doctor. He is also a Vietnam vet (4th Infantry, Central Highlands 1968). Follow him on Twitter: @Cann4ing.

But even as we Occupy, there are many who cannot envision anything other than, "...to persuade political elites, who long ago sold their souls to the corporate security state, to vote the right way on this or that issue."

There are many who even knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that they have been deceived, cannot bring themselves to withdraw their support.

Someday I'll be able to advocate that people stop voting in faith-based elections for people they cannot hold accountable, without incurring your hostility and that of many others here on BradBlog, and being told that nobody here agrees with me. One day those who agree with me will even openly post their agreement instead of sending me private emails to avoid incurring the wrath of those who will continue to consent to corruption until their dying breath.

The corruption is not in the candidates, or the political parties, it is in the system. Prof. Robert Jensen said, at a teach-in at Occupy Austin, that if we don't change the system, we're always going to find that the new boss is just like the old boss. A lot of people really didn't expect "change" to mean more wars, bigger bailouts, and the assassination of US citizens without due process.

When S. Brian Willson was here on his recent book tour (I heartily recommend Blood on the Tracks for anyone who hasn't read it yet), I asked him during the Q&A what he thought about election boycotts. He said that he agreed with me and believed that not voting was a form of noncompliance. In the book he lists many forms of noncompliance, some of which you've mentioned above, that are necessary to change the system.

I've been giving teach-ins and posting to various Occupy forums, and most Occupiers are able to understand that voting is the consent of the governed, and that if we do not consent, we need to stop voting.

But some people don't want to change the system. They've dedicated their lives to getting Democrats elected and they are so apathetic that they couldn't care less what those Democrats do once in office, as long as they can get them elected.

As an Occupier, I'm not going to give up or lose faith in people just because there are a minority of die-hard supporters of a broken system. There are many more people who really do want a better system and we're creating it for ourselves because nobody who is part of the old, corrupt system will ever do it for us.

Dredd: I too agree that politics, as now conducted in the U.S., is predicated on deception. Where Mark and I disagree is on the solution.

"We must become the change we want to see in the world." - Mohandus Gandhi

OWS must become the egalitarian democracy it seeks to achieve.

I've asked Mark repeatedly how boycotting the electoral process will achieve the goal of becoming the egalitarian democracy it seeks to achieve. To date, he has failed to provide an answer.

You do not become a democracy by abandoning the political process. You become a democracy by embracing it; changing it so that the test of leadership is fealty to the needs of the 99% as opposed to money used to purchase deceptive ads on the commercial media --- a fool's errand for the Left which only serves as a further transfer of wealth to the titans at the pinnacle of a conglomerated corporate media.

As I stated in the article, Occupy Wall Street has before it a myriad of peaceful, non-violent tactics at its disposal. The first and most fundamental change must come from within.

We must change not only whom we elect, but how we elect. Each of us must stop relying upon a corporate-owned media as a primary source of information. We must convince others to turn to alternative, non-commercial media for information.

Yes, we need to transform the system to hand-marked, publicly hand counted ballots. But, I, for one, cannot see how boycotting elections --- thereby voluntarily abdicating individual responsibility so as to accomplish for the GOP the voter suppression they spend so much time seeking to accomplish --- will achieve electoral transparency.

Finally, I am troubled that Mark, who is unable to explain how his half-baked idea can possibly succeed, has assumed the role of "teacher" at OWS. There are numerous ways to demonstrate our withdrawal of consent to the corporate security state without shooting ourselves in the foot by abandoning the political process.

It seems to me, to abandon the system to the corrupt is a bad move. We the people still need to choose our reps carefully. Factual and truthful information is a requirement that is sorely lacking in the MSM. There is an assault on the internet coming from the corporate slugs, as well as, a continued assault on the information emanating from the MSM. We may need to resort to the OWS type of reporting, using the "human" mic check system. I agree we should go back to pre-electronic voting machines. The electronic types are too easy to fiddle with, as we found out in Wisconsin. But voting is still a non-violent path to overthrow the corruption in American politics.

The BIG story to me here is the unprecedented news blackout by the MSM (aside from the Chris Hayes show on MSNBC).
Try to find this story on CNN. Try to find it in the "paper of record" the New﻿ York Times (you know, the city this took place in). Guess there's just not enough drama or 'human interest' to this story to merit coverage.

Obviously, the "liberal" media doesn't want this one to be seen.
The revolution will NOT be televised.

They would not even wait for a good Staling approved election to take place in all of its mother board wonder.

No! They rebelled against their modern American masters who counseled them:

Egypt's army-appointed government handed in its resignation Monday, an apparent gesture to thousands of protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square who clashed for the third straight day with security forces in violence that has killed at least 24 people and posed the most sustained challenge yet to the rule of the military.

As I wrote in Occupy Wall Street is No 'Tea Party', OWS is a genuine, organic, knowledge-driven democratic uprising that is driven by the fundamental contradiction between the America's "promise" and its "reality."

The American "promise" is embodied in the lofty, egalitarian principles of the Declaration of Independence, in the recognition provided by the U.S. Constitution that the purpose of government is to "promote the general welfare," and in the concept inscribed above the portico of the U.S. Supreme Court --- "EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW." The "reality," as noted by former New York Times reporter, Chris Hedges, is that political power in the U.S. has been seized by a "criminal class" of rapacious oligarchs, whose radical goal is not merely the ability to carry out their criminal pillage of the economy and the environment with impunity, but the decimation of "all impediments to the creation of a neo-feudalistic corporate state."

OWS entails both a rejection of the corporate security state and its replacement by a genuine egalitarian democracy.

If you can get past playing the victim card, you would understand that when I suggest that OWS must become the egalitarian democracy it seeks, I am speaking about how we achieve a core component of the movement.

We must not only "occupy" city parks and march. We must look to every peaceful means for simultaneously rejecting corporate power and assuming political power by "occupying every state house and Congress" via elected "representatives."

By "representatives" I have in mind electoral participation that mandates fealty to the interests of the 99% and a refusal to accept corporate monies from any source. That is what representative democracy is supposed to be --- and it's a far cry from the deceptive system in which elections are now determined by corporate wealth and power.

It is nothing short of infantile to shun the political process, when so much can be accomplished by honestly embracing it, even as we march, and move the money, and educate, and turn people away from the MSM and to alternative media as their primary source of news.

I am well aware of Stalin's observation that those who cast the votes decide nothing and those who count the votes decide everything. In case you haven't noticed, I've written numerous articles about election integrity and the need for transparency.

But please explain to me how shunning the electoral process will ensure electoral transparency or remove so much as a single DRE or optical scan system now in use? Do you think that we can refuse to vote and those systems will miraculously vanish?

It is possible to walk and chew gum at the same time. It is also possible for OWS to embrace the political process and demand transparency at the same time.

If so, keep up the good work, if not don't keep doing the same thing expecting a different result.

For those it is not working for, they protest (boycott, refuse to vote one election cycle to let the facade feel the silence, strikes, work stoppages, and the like), trying to take back what was taken in the coup of the 1%, who cannot be voted out of office.

Dredd: How does your failing to show up for an election cause those that do to "feel the silence?"

I'm all for targeted general strikes, but when you don't show up to vote, you cede political power to those who do. If the only people who do show up are the ones that the Koch brothers want to show up, you let those who could care less about the will of the 99% to seize all power.

Dredd. There is zero prospect of (a) a U.S. election where no one showed up & (b) mass resignations of all U.S. elected officials.

Democracy is not an "experiment" in physics. If your boycott elections experiment failed, the result would be the elimination of every progressive politician and the ceding of total control to the oligarchy.

I can't see anyone with an ounce of sense who would foolishly take that risk in light of the consequences of failure.

The Occupy Wall Street movement is learning and practicing direct democracy, but is still extremely naive and easily co-opted.

A government that breaks its promises, lies, cheats, steals trillions of dollars, kills millions of innocent people, destroys the planet for profit, and even asserts the right to assassinate its own citizens without due process, isn't the sort of government that anyone who cares about democracy should consent to. Your vote, as I've been saying for many years now, is your consent.

You can continue to consent to get screwed if you want to, but don't come crying to me when you get what you asked for.